Weekly Overwatch News Recap – Week #31

Welcome to an all new week of the Overwatch News Recap. Not a lot of news this week, but with the Contenders Playoffs in Korea and the World Cup around the corner, we should have some more updates incoming for next week.

Overwatch League

We have at least one update for the Overwatch League this week.

Atlanta and Guangzhou officially announced for Season 2

On Thursday, August 2, 2018, Blizzard finally announced the two rumored expansion teams for OWL season two. The first new team will represent Atlanta, Ga. The new team is owned by Cox Enterprises, a communications and services company. Cox owns newspapers, television, radio stations and more.

The second team will be based in Guangzhou, China and is owned by the Nenking Group, who operates in the financial and entertainment sector. No other information like team names or rosters have been revealed. The signing window for negotiations between the current teams and the new teams started on Aug. 1. And starting on Sept. 9, the new expansion teams are free to sign any free agents.

You can find the news for the new teams here, and the signing window dates here.

Overwatch World Cup Paris sold out in One and a half hours

It took only one and half hours before the tickets for the Overwatch World Cup Group Stage in Paris sold out. After Europe had no event throughout the Overwatch League Season 1, it was to be expected that fans were eager to get their ticket. With England, Spain, the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany and Luxembourg all neighbors to France, 1,500 seats were not enough. There had been no announcement for the first wave, so a lot of people complained about the process and the small amount of tickets.

A second batch of tickets became available on Friday, but also sold out rather quickly. It doesn’t look like there will be a third batch of tickets, unless Blizzard changes the venue on short notice.

Overwatch World Cup – Map pool and selection

Jayne, coach for Team Canada and assistant coach for the Dallas Fuel, has revealed the map pool and selection process for the Overwatch World Cup during one of his streams.

The first map will be a Control map, and the losing team will pick the next map. Apparently, there are no restrictions and all maps will be available to pick from.

If this is indeed true, then these rules are different from the current Contenders, with a predetermined Map Pool. The game types are played in the order of Control, Hybrid, Assault and Escort with two maps for each type. The first map will be decided by the tournament administration, while the following maps are decided by the losing team. Therefore the team that did not chose a map, can select the side.

We will see what the exact rules for the World Cup are, on Thursday, Aug. 16, at 8 p.m. PDT.

I was born in Germany and now live in the UK since 2015. I started to get into gaming with my first NES, playing Mario. I owned each of the Nintendo consoles after, until I got my first PC when I was around 14. Some years later, I played my first RTS (Command & Conquer) and FPS (Wolfenstein) games and never quit playing. I prefer team games and played an Unreal Tournament Mod called Deathball for over 10 years. Overwatch got me into the eSports scene, and was the motivator to change my path – from working in the IT to do something I love.
Some of my all time favourite games are Soldier of Fortune II, Deathball, Warcraft 3, F.E.A.R, Zelda, Mario Kart and Overwatch. Besides gaming, I love to read and write and spending time with my cats.

I was born in Germany and now live in the UK since 2015. I started to get into gaming with my first NES, playing Mario. I owned each of the Nintendo consoles after, until I got my first PC when I was around 14. Some years later, I played my first RTS (Command & Conquer) and FPS (Wolfenstein) games and never quit playing. I prefer team games and played an Unreal Tournament Mod called Deathball for over 10 years. Overwatch got me into the eSports scene, and was the motivator to change my path – from working in the IT to do something I love.
Some of my all time favourite games are Soldier of Fortune II, Deathball, Warcraft 3, F.E.A.R, Zelda, Mario Kart and Overwatch. Besides gaming, I love to read and write and spending time with my cats.